Mechanical vapor recompression (MVR), also known as vapor compression distillation, is utilized in industry as an efficient distillation technique to remove and/or isolate water from industrial process fluid wastewater. The use of MVR to treat wastewater from an industrial process permits the recycling of the treated water and reduces waste disposal, thereby conserving costs of environmental clean-up. Further, any water removed via MVR can be reused in the same industrial process, which also conserves costs.
MVR has been utilized alone or in conjunction with ultrafiltration (UF) for processing industrial process wastewater. See, Labrecque et al., Chem. Eng., February, 2004. UF is useful for the removal of larger molecular diameter chemical compounds from industrial process fluid wastewater.
While MVR and/or UF are two processes that have been previously independently utilized to recover water from industrial process waste streams, there remains a need in the art for processes utilizing MVR and UF for treating industrial process fluids for the purpose of recovering useful materials, other than water, from the wastewater.